Design thinking — Ideation
Ideation is about exploring new possibilities and coming up with solutions to challenges. This means you have to quickly generate, develop, and test ideas.
We believe some of the most ideas come when you fight the urged to stop on an early solution and embrace the discomfort that comes from exploring more. Let’s see about how divergent thinking invites you to play longer and stretch beyond your early ideas.
What is ideation？Getting comfortable with divergent thinking. Ideation is all about coming up with lots and lots of ideas quickly. This is critical when moving from ideas to action.
Starting with 30 circles on a page, and using just a few lines, either inside or outside of the circle, create many identify objects as you can in three minutes.
Take 3 minutes to complete the 30 circles activity. You might have come up with some pretty admirable ideas. In early ideation, it’s often tough to tell the difference. If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it. We referred to coming up with lots of ideas as divergent thinking. Again, it’s all about quantity. I suspect when doing the 30circles activity, many you had more ideas but didn’t use them because you thought they were silly.
Maybe you drew a couple of different kinds of sports balls. That’s a natural place to start and helps you get fluent with your ideas. But flexibility, thinking outside the lines, is important too. See how this ridiculous led to something that was actually admirable. So, ideally in this activity, you diverged stretching beyond just your first few ideas. You didn’t worry if something sounded silly. You embraced your playful mindset.
But counterbalanced to divergent thinking is convergent thinking. Converging is about looking at all your ideas and making decisions about which one to move forward with. Well divergent converge several times throughout the process. Two more things about playful ideation. Number one, ideation is meant to be a team spot. Ideation is a team sport.
It helps to have diverse perspectives when you’re diverging. If you’re working alone, find ways to pull people in, anyone can ideate, and number two, diverge a bit longer. Stay in the mindset, keep going, exercise your divergent muscles and keep your urged to converge. It’s not time for decision making yet.
